Steam now offers the
rumored but never announced
Stasis Interrupted DLC for Aliens: Colonial Marines, proving
the
report saying this would happen to be accurate. The pack will be the last DLC
for Gearbox's FPS and requires the base game to play. It is offered for USD
$9.99, though it is free for those who purchased a season pass. Here's word on
how this bridges the story of Aliens with the not-masterpiece that was Aliens
3:

'Stasis Interrupted' is the final piece of Aliens™: Colonial Marines
DLC telling the story of what happened to Hicks between Aliens™ and Alien³™.

In this new campaign you play as 3 different characters through an interlocking
story. Waking up unexpectedly from hypersleep, Lisbeth and others must figure
out why the spaceship they are on, the Legato, has been diverted to intercept
the Sulaco leaving LV-426's orbit.

Fight your way through the alien infested spaceship, find out what Michael
Weyland is after and discover what truly happened to Hicks.

Time for me to chime in with my unwanted and off topic opinion of Aliens 3.

I think it is a very underrated film, especially after watching the unofficial 'directors cut', or whatever it's called. If you own the blu-rays you owe it to yourself to watch the amazingly extensive behind the scenes. It gave me a whole new appreciation for the film, and for the shit Fincher had to put up with during the production. The man is a fantastic director and considering this was his first major motion picture (I believe), and the studio was giving him a hard time with everything, I think it was quite an accomplishment. Sure he might have gone widely over budget and made mistakes and had been difficult to work with, but again, it wasn't easy for him either. It is no wonder he disowns the thing, I don't blame him.

In spite of all that, I think the movie just oozes atmosphere, much more in line with Alien. The movie has quite a few interesting characters, and it is, in my option, cool to see this how the prisoners react to something more cold and violent than themselves. At the same time Ripley is dealing with the loss of both Hicks and Newt, a girl that gave her a chance to be a mother figure again. Also how she learns and accepts the horrible fact that she carries an alien within her, something that she has spent decades running from.

Drayth wrote on Jul 24, 2013, 15:48:One thing to note (though I doubt this was with deliberate foresite), you can hear the sound of an alien egg opening at the *very* end of Aliens after the credits roll.

Oh, wait, that squishy sound? Yeah, sorry, that's not an alien egg, it was just me licking the popcorn butter off my fingers...

=-Rigs-=

So full of hate were our eyes, that none of us could see our war would yield countless dead, but never victory. So let us cast arms aside, and like discard our wrath. Thou, in faith, will keep us safe. Whilst we find The Path. - Halo:Contact Harvest

People scratch their head and wonder when and how an egg could have been put on the Sulaco to cause the death of Hicks and Newt but have no issues accepting the fact that an Alien got on board the dropship which was suppose to rescue the bunch after shit hit the fan much earlier in the film.

It's not out of the realm of possibility that that same Xeno brought an egg on board especially when the Queen would not have been able to lay an egg as she detached from the egg-laying apparatus in order to chase Ripley. Granted, the only time the Xeno would have had time to get on board in the first place was when they did the initial touchdown before the camera pans around to show the Marines running away from the dropship as it pulls away with the bay open.

It sucks that there is no official explanation as to how it happened and why it required both of the major characters to be killed off in order to progress the story when it could have gone any other way to achieve the same results. Leaving it in the hands of the fans to come up with a plausible explanation is fun and all but it should have been reserved for a much lesser issue.

I loved Aliens 3 (just not at release...first time I saw it, I was disappointed). I think the big thing about Aliens 3, is that it is so grim. The other two movies start with some levity, then get to the killing (in the end, most everyone dies, regardless of which movie it is). Aliens 3 kills off two main characters before it even gets going, and it's all downhill from there.

I don't think anyone is saying Alien 3 is brilliant (its really not), just that it's a different sort of movie like how Aliens was a very different movie from Alien. There's nothing wrong with a different approach, the execution was just all over the place. Personally I think the DC is a much better film but even still it has many problems. Thankfully it is much better than Alien Resurrection which is so bad I cringed through most of it.

Queen was mass producing worker aliens. Strung up to take the pressure off her body. Even the tube could be moved around to place eggs in different locations. The egg the Queen deliberately planted for Ripley was a Queen making egg.

Anyways, whole point was that the game was already working with what was already broken by the Alien 3 writers.

And again, all you are doing is saying "they should have done this instead". Anybody can do that. I could sit here and list off a dozen possibilities for Alien stories they could have done. It all means nothing as that's not what they did do and went another direction with it again with 4, AvP movies and then Prometheus. So the one thing they have been consistent about is being inconsistent with their mythology and film style.

Orogogus wrote on Jul 24, 2013, 04:50:Didn't the queen tear off her entire egg laying apparatus before going after Ripley, well before she was anywhere near the dropship?

It's another common question and adds to how the egg got there in the first place. Only real answer is, we don't know if a Queen can lay eggs without the whole apparatus. So suspension of disbelief says it's possible.

If that's the case, having the egg sac in the movie at all is kind of dumb. What would be the point of showing her laying the egg, and then tearing off the sac before going after Ripley? It would be like Schwarzenegger in Predator going all low tech, setting up all his traps and arrows and what not, and then going into the climactic matchup just to pull out a minigun and mow down the predator.

Regarding Alien 3, I like to think it would be possible to build off the second movie without simply retelling the same story. The old comic books went to a pretty weird place, but at least there was a progression. Alien 3 rehashed Alien to such an extent that you could expect the third one to have an alien invading a circus, or taking Manhattan, or so on. Other than style and atmosphere, what does it add to the story? Even disregarding the second movie, why is it important that the main character is Ripley, or that the monster is a xenomorph instead of a velociraptor? Even if I thought Aliens was terrible, what did Alien 3 add to the first movie?

Or is it like when people say that a Transformers movie is all good as long as it has giant robots and explosions?

To me it addded a whole lot to the story, although its not an obviously narrative experience. First of all the emotions that Ripley experiences on learning of the loss of Newt and Hicks, and then of learning that she herself is infected. She moves past fear and loss to something like cold rage, in fact she comes back full circle from running away from these horrors to actually facing them head on. Second, the prisoners themselves and their community is something that is new. We root for a bunch of rapists, killers and much worse because in the face of the alien threat and adversity humanity resurfaces and shines through. Lastly the corporation is given a face, and its an inhuman android face, something that is even further removed, detached from us than the Alien itself and is subsequently the 'real' threat to humanity.

Let me just remind you of one brilliant scene in the movie, probably the best scene in the whole trilogy (IMO). The funeral ceremony of Hicks and Newt, the narration of the pastor/prisoner superimposed with the scenes of the hatching and a closeup of Ripley having a nosebleed.

Can we just agree to dsiagree on this whole Aliens/Aliens3 thing? You guys are running in circles that have been well-worn into the pavement by other geeks years before...you're not going to come up with anything new that makes any difference in the storyline (unless your making a new movie, in which case I'll give you the number to my agent ) and, on top of that, I've only seen ONE person here mention anything about how the DLC retcons the story, which IS official (supposedly). And no one's talking about it. C'mon guys, it's old already. I know, I know...really, I do. But it's a waste of time...there are whole FORUMS set up for this argument alone, and they're well ahead of ya...

=-Rigs-=

So full of hate were our eyes, that none of us could see our war would yield countless dead, but never victory. So let us cast arms aside, and like discard our wrath. Thou, in faith, will keep us safe. Whilst we find The Path. - Halo:Contact Harvest

Orogogus wrote on Jul 24, 2013, 04:50:Didn't the queen tear off her entire egg laying apparatus before going after Ripley, well before she was anywhere near the dropship?

It's another common question and adds to how the egg got there in the first place. Only real answer is, we don't know if a Queen can lay eggs without the whole apparatus. So suspension of disbelief says it's possible.

If that's the case, having the egg sac in the movie at all is kind of dumb. What would be the point of showing her laying the egg, and then tearing off the sac before going after Ripley? It would be like Schwarzenegger in Predator going all low tech, setting up all his traps and arrows and what not, and then going into the climactic matchup just to pull out a minigun and mow down the predator.

Regarding Alien 3, I like to think it would be possible to build off the second movie without simply retelling the same story. The old comic books went to a pretty weird place, but at least there was a progression. Alien 3 rehashed Alien to such an extent that you could expect the third one to have an alien invading a circus, or taking Manhattan, or so on. Other than style and atmosphere, what does it add to the story? Even disregarding the second movie, why is it important that the main character is Ripley, or that the monster is a xenomorph instead of a velociraptor? Even if I thought Aliens was terrible, what did Alien 3 add to the first movie?

Or is it like when people say that a Transformers movie is all good as long as it has giant robots and explosions?

Orogogus wrote on Jul 24, 2013, 04:50:Didn't the queen tear off her entire egg laying apparatus before going after Ripley, well before she was anywhere near the dropship?

It's another common question and adds to how the egg got there in the first place. Only real answer is, we don't know if a Queen can lay eggs without the whole apparatus. So suspension of disbelief says it's possible.

Orogogus wrote on Jul 24, 2013, 04:47:Aliens had already advanced it past the monster film stage. It established additional character shadings for Ripley. It showed Weyland-Yutani moving their agenda forward. Instead of one alien there was a colony of them -- and a queen. Instead of an unarmed crew trying to survive with materials at hand it was an armed military squad.

So how did the third movie move things further forward? Kind of didn't.

People complain that films, games, and tv shows go off in the wrong direction and want things to "go back to their roots" all the time. All you are doing is suggesting they follow the path of the second movie instead of going the direction they did. Both Alien and Aliens were different styles of film and succeeded on their own merits. Nobody remembers this, but there were a lot of hardcore Alien fans that were not happy with the departure from the style of the first film.

It's really easy to sit back after the fact and say they should have gone the other way and made the obvious sequel stylistically to Aliens. But when writing, sometimes the last thing you want to do is the obvious. Did we really want to watch the same 3 characters go through the exact same situation again, doing the exact same things? It's a trap that is really easy to write for and hasn't worked out for a lot of movie sequels.

So yes, I think it was brave to not just do the obvious. Unfortunately it didn't work out so well. And who knows how it would have been if Fox had just let Fincher make the movie without interference. But as for the writing, it wasn't Fincher and it was people that had been involved with the Aliens story.

InBlack wrote on Jul 24, 2013, 04:30:Well the queen didnt lay the egg(s) in the drop pod, Im guessing that she laid the egg(s) somewhere in the drop shuttle struts. The eggs hatched and the facehuggers managed to get into the drop pod (along with the cryochambers). There were two, one for Ripley and obviously one for the doberman/cow (depending on which version you watched).

There was a shot of an egg in the escape pod in Aliens 3. Edit: now that I think about it, the egg could have been on the Sulaco in that opening scene. Basically the writers along the way, starting with Alien 3 have totally messed up the continuity of their own IP.

And I thought it was implied it was the same facehugger that impregnated Ripley, as she did not have the facehugger on her when they pulled her from the crash.

Didn't the queen tear off her entire egg laying apparatus before going after Ripley, well before she was anywhere near the dropship?

EDIT: I suppose she could have turned around, smothered the flames one of the eggs and taken it to the dropship, walking on two legs. Maybe in the remastered special edition.